It Is Sorely Missed

Conceptions of leisure activities have changed over the years. The fact that people now sun themselves lying on towels in Central Park while wearing quite brief bathing suits would seem as weird to people in the 1870s, when the park was new, as the presence of sheep in the Sheep Meadow would be today. So you can occasionally come across references to things in the park that seem out of place. Such as this stereoscopic view, from the early 1870s, of a camera obscura in the park.

A camera obscura is basically a room-sized pinhole camera – some non-purists have made them using lenses instead of pinholes, but I doubt that was true here – to project images on a wall. If you want to be fancy, you can use a mirror to project the image on a table or floor; if you want to look at the sky, the image will naturally fall on the floor. Many cameras obscura are built with turntables or other mechanisms to allow views of different directions.

They’re a nice demonstration of some principles of optics, but I suspect their popularity in the nineteenth century had more to do with entertainment. They were weird and gave people a break from everyday life. And in that sense, it makes sense to put one in Central Park. Olmstead and Vaux conceived of the park as a place of relaxation in a formal sense, not necessarily a place for active play, and a camera obscura – whether put there by them or someone else – fits as a harmless curiosity. Certainly, the only interior view that I know of shows well-to-do people enjoying themselves while gawking.